Cover Crops

Dakota's Best Seed offers a variety of cover crops in order to meet your specific farms needs! Call us today to discuss what cover crop mixtures would benefit your operation!

Cover crops provide wide variety of benefits...

USDA-NRCS
conservation agronomist Jason Miller said using a cocktail or mixture of cover
crops provides the most benefit to soil health and meets the varied objectives
producers are likely to have when planting a cover crop. Some of those objectives include: providing livestock grazing, increasing
nitrogen, stopping erosion, managing water and weeds, reducing compaction and
boosting organic matter.

“The mixtures are critical because there’s
not one single species that’s going to meet all your objectives,” Miller
said. “More that likely a guy is going
to want to have soil health, reduce soil compaction and provide fertilized
stock grazing. You are going to need a
multitude of species. It’s very common
to plant three to five species out in your field.”

Miller defines a cover crop as any crop
planted between periods of regular cash crop production. For producers growing wheat and other small
grains, cover crops fit in between late summer harvest and spring
planting. For some corn growers, cover
crops fit in between the fall silage harvest and spring planting.

Soybean and grain corn producers generally
do not have the opportunity to plant cover crops because harvest occurs too
late in the season, Miller said, but some options do exist if the weather and
timing allow.

Cover crops are also a great alternative
to summer fallow because they save moisture and keep nutrients near the soil
surface, he said. “For the summer fallow guys, I think it’s an
excellent fit for them to put something in there to keep some soil biology
moving versus keeping that environment sterilized, which basically that’s what
fallow does,” Miller said.

But how can cover crops save moisture by
using moisture?

Miller said that even the best soils can
only hold 11 inches of plant-available water. Other soils in South Dakota will only hold 8-9 inches. Miller said once the soil is full, it won’t
hold anymore, meaning producers are essentially wasting water by not using it.

District conservationist in Burleigh County,
ND, Jay Fuhrer said cover crops actually increase the soil’s ability to hold
water because they add soil aggregates, or make the soil more porous. Cover crops also put more roots into the
soil, which increase the organic matter present and fees the soil.

“I think one of the first things we have to
recognize here is that the soil is alive,” Fuhrer said. “And if it’s alive, it’s eating, it needs to
eat and it has a home.”

Soil diversity is one of the most important
benefits of cover crops, Fuhrer said, because those crops provide a better diet
for the soil.

Increasing the number of plant species grown
on a field will remedy a poor soil diet.